Archive for July 17th, 2009

Apparently the largest ever hand-dug excavation in the world, this 1097 meter deep mine yielded over 3 tons of diamonds before being closed.

2. Glory Hole — Monticello Dam, California

A glory hole is used when a dam is at full capacity and water needs to be drained from the reservoir. This is the ‘Glory Hole’ at Monticello dam, and it’s the largest in the world of this type of spillway, its size enabling it to consume 14,400 cubic feet of water every second.

3. Great Blue Hole — Belize

This incredible geographical phenomenon, known as a blue hole, is situated 60 miles off the mainland of Belize. There are numerous blue holes around the world, but none as stunning as this one.

4. Sinkhole — Guatemala

These photos are of a sinkhole that occurred early this year in Guatemala. The hole swallowed 2 dozen homes and killed at least 3 people.

5. And the really terrifying one!

This is the ‘Biggest Sink Hole of All’ that you have heard about. It is capable of swallowing trillions and trillions of U.S. dollars … Annually!

NOAA has as expected announced that June 2009 for the globe was the second warmest June in 130 years, falling just short of 2005. NASA GISS which starts with NCDC GHCN and then adds their own special touches had this June the second warmest on record just behind 1998.

In SHARP contrast, NASA UAH MSU satellite assessment had June virtually normal (+0.001C or 15th coldest in 31 years) and RSS (+0.075C or 14th coldest in 31 years). This is becoming a habit.

NOAA proclaimed May 2009 to be the 4th warmest for the globe in 130 years of record keeping. Meanwhile NASA UAH MSU satellite assessment showed it was the 15th coldest May in the 31 years of its record. This divergence is not new and has been growing. Just a year ago, NOAA proclaimed June 2008 to be the 8th warmest for the globe in 129 years of record keeping. Meanwhile NASA satellites showed it was the 9th coldest June in the 30 years of its record.

We have noted in the last year that NOAA has often become the warmest of the 5 major data sets in their monthly global anomalies. They were second place until they removed the USHCN UHI adjustment in 2007 and introduced a new ocean data set recently.

NOAA and the other ground based data centers would have more credibility if one of the changes resulting in a reduction of the warming trend and not an exaggeration which has been the case each and every time.

During the 1991 Gulf War, CNN broadcast fake coverage from studios in Saudi Arabia. Viewers suspected nothing. See CNN’s Charles Jaco joke off-camera about the hoax they were playing. Don’t think for a moment they’ve stopped doing this. One only has to watch this clip to understand how a global media giant like CNN can fool not just a population, but an entire planet…

In 1991 CNN aired, day after day, fake coverage from “Saudi Arabia” during the Gulf War.

CNN’s Charles Jaco and his crew never left the studio. And nobody suspected anything. Nobody would even imagine they were acting and laughing about it. So what makes you think the media stopped doing this?

Watch the video below…

The Tonka Report Editor’s Note:As soon as I posted the image above of Charles Jaco reporting for CNN from Saudi Arabia during the first Gulf War, it was promptly removed from Google Images and thus, my website. I was going to change the image, but have decided to leave it as is (blank) as a testimony to the censorship of this out of control, illegitimate government with the complicity of Google… – Tonka

The Tonka Report Update: Well, well, the image of Jaco is back after I posted those previous comments that made it to the Google Search page. Hmmm… – Tonka

The unreality that has long pervaded American politics, policy-making and media reportage is by now almost totally impenetrable. Both action and analysis in the most powerful nation in history now take place in a fantasy world, a simulacrum, a state of permanent amnesia in which facts — established, confirmed, published — vanish almost in the very moment of their appearance. Anyone who tries to reason their way through this feverish hallucination is bound to fail — or succumb to the madness themselves.

This hallucinatory quality of American public life has been on vivid display in recent days, with stories in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, Newsweek and elsewhere about a secret CIA program to develop death squads to exterminate “top al Qaeda leaders” in Israeli-style “targeted assassinations.” We are told that Dick Cheney was responsible for drawing up these plans — and for illegally keeping them secret from Congressional oversight. We are also assured that these plans, promulgated by a presidential directive in 2001, “hadn’t become fully operational” by the time that new CIA Director Leon Panetta terminated them after taking up his post earlier this year. The plans were developed, we’re told, but never implemented. Still, the very fact of their existence is considered by some commentators as a grave scandal, one made even worse by Cheney’s cover-up.

All of this is very curious. For the established, confirmed, published fact of the matter is that a CIA assassination program run by the White House on direct orders from the president was put into operation in late 2001. It was operative for many years (and might still be operative; we of course do not know what program Panetta actually terminated — or if he really has terminated any program). Nor was this assassination program aimed solely at “top al Qaeda leaders”: it targeted any number of “suspected” terrorists, whose guilt — and sentence of death — was arbitrary decided by the president, or by the agents in the field to whom Bush issued a literal license to kill. The first known victim of this CIA death squad was an American citizen, killed by a CIA-fired drone missile in Yemen. By Bush’s own public admission — in a nationally televised appearance before both houses of Congress in 2003 — many “suspected terrorists” (his own description) had been killed by American agents.

None of this was secret. All of the above facts were reported in reputable, mainstream newspapers and journals — the New York Times, the Washington Post, the Washington Times, the New Yorker, etc. — beginning in October 2001. And these stories themselves were based on statements by Administration officials, who in many instances were eager to brag about “taking the gloves off” and other macho locutions. Or as one CIA operative in Afghanistan told the Boston Globe in 2002: “We are doing things I never believed we would do — and I mean killing people.”

U.S. District Judge Clay Land sided with the government, represented by Maj. Rebecca Ausprung, which claimed Cook’s suit was “moot” because the Army had already told him he doesn’t have to deploy, so the relief he is seeking has been granted.

“The same Constitution upon which Major Cook relies in support of his contention that President Barack Obama is not eligible to serve as President of the United States very clearly provides that federal courts shall only have the authority to hear actual ‘cases and controversies,’” Land stated in his written order. “By restricting the Judiciary’s power to actual ‘cases and controversies,’ our founders wisely established a separation of powers that would ensure the freedom of their fellow citizens. They concluded that the Judicial Branch, the unelected branch, should not inject itself into purely ‘political disputes,’ and that it should not entangle itself in hypothetical debates which had not ripened to an actual legal dispute.”